We're Computer Scientists!

To start the term off the Exploration Station hosted two of our year 4 classes.

We reviewed what the station was about and our Safe and Sting SHINE Online learning from last term.   It was great to hear all about how our learners are staying safe online.  Most of our learners are well aware of the importance of letting their Mum, Dad and caregivers know what they're doing online, creating strong passwords and using resources that are just right for them.

Students were very keen to get creating in our space so we learnt a bit more about SHINE Online by looking at Helpful and smart before we planned how we could show others about being Helpful and Smart using Makey Makey's and scratch.

To help us with our Scratch coding we listened to the story If I were a Wizard by Paul Hamilton.  In this story, Hazel introduced us to some coding/computer science concepts like repeats and loops as well as sequence and order.    We talked about how computers only do what we tell them to - or what we've programmed them to do and that if we want the computer to give the right output we have to think carefully about the steps we tell it to go through. We then put this learning into practice while we created a variety of different things to teach others about being Helpful and Smart online.

We did a lot of debugging once we connected our Makey Makey's to our creations as some of our code didn't work.  We had to think carefully about our sequence and what we were asking our computer to do once it received inputs from our Makey Makey.

We didn't quite get all our creations finished so we took them back to our classrooms to do a bit more testing, making and sharing.